302 HISTORICAL FOOTPRINTS IN AMERICA. 



1G20, -when the Pilgrim Fathers landed on Plymouth Rock, to give 

 the old ruin on Newport common as great a value in the eye of every 

 true hearted American, as the Catt Stane can claim from the 

 British antiquary who helieves that its rude letters record the burial- 

 place of Vetta son of Victus, son of Woden, the lineal ancestor of 

 Hengist, the Teutonic colonist of England. 



A picturesque old relic, known par excellence as The Old House of 

 Boston, stood till 1860 at the corner of North and Market Streets of 

 the New England Capital, with its quaint gables, and overhanging 

 oaken-timbered walls, such as abound in the old capitals of Europe, 

 and look as if they had been built before the laws of gravitation had 

 a being. The date latterly assigned to it was 1680; but the march 

 of improvement knows no antiquarian sympathies ; and a range of 

 modern warehouses has usurped the site of the venerable civic relic. 

 Here and there among the burial grounds of New England and other 

 older States, weathered and half-defaced stones commemorate the 

 worth of early colonists ; and doubtless some lie buried, where they 

 may be found in other ages, when the Roman characters and English 

 language of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will seem as 

 strange to the eyes of a new generation as the runes of the Greenland 

 Norsemen do to our own. But a recent discovery towards the 

 northern limits of the New England States suffices to encourage 

 the hope that still earlier traces of the first European colonists may 

 yet gratify intelligent curiosity with glimpses of the beginnings of' 

 America's history. This new found historical footprint of the seven- 

 teenth century, only brought to light in the autumn of 1863, is a 

 plate of copper measuring ten inches by eight, found at Castine, in 

 the State of Maine, — the old Indian Pentagoet, — near tbe mouth of 

 the Penobscot river, famous with the Kennebunk, or Kennebec, as it 

 is now called, as marches of the French and English debateable land, 

 subsequent to the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. It was discovered in 

 the course of excavations made in constructing a battery at the 

 mouth of Castine harbour.* The corroded sheet of copper attracted 

 no attention when first restored to light ; nor was it till its discoverer 

 had cut a piece off it to repair a boat, that his attention was drawn 

 to the characters engraved on its surface. Fortunately the detached 

 piece was easily recovered ; and on being restored to its place, the 

 inscription was decyphered as follows : 



* Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, April, 1864. p. 60. 



